Any information on the location/format of armor models and textures?

I recently started playing Guild Wars, and am getting to the point where I'll be buying my first elite armor (for an assassin, if anyone is curious). I liked the look of a certain armor, but I also liked some of the EotN pieces and wanted to mix and match -- however, I'm not sure how it'll look after doing so, and it's a pretty expensive mistake to make. So I'm looking into making an external program that'll display the armor pieces on a character model, so everyone can "try before they buy", if you will.

I'm having a spot of trouble finding the models and textures, though. Is there any more updated information on the Guild Wars archive format than this? I haven't been able to find nearly enough information to get the location (and formats) of the models and textures to make this dream a reality. I know that it's possible to capture them from video memory, but there are problems: I'd have to get volunteers for each set of armor, and I'm very leery of running into licensing issues (I do *not* want to redistribute anyone's intellectual property -- just an external utility that can examine what's already on the hard drive).

So, has anyone investigated the archive format further than what's on the wiki? Anyone managed to find and utilize the models? If I can get the information I need, I look forward to sharing the tool with whoever wants to double-check they're getting what they want before they buy!

All I know is that they use Granny.

At least that is what Rad Game Tools page says.
http://www.radgametools.com/granny/customers.html

you could always ask for someone to post a screen shot here with the set you would like to see, people love showing off their armors

start here: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ition-f11.html


and theres a post somewhere around here with an external link to a site that has SS's of many armor combos too, i just don't remember where that post was

would be a very useful tool that could remove the need to ask for screenshots of characters with certain armor pieces altogether. would you make it similar to the stylist in temple of balthazar (for extreme makeovers) but with armor sets as well as face/hair etc?

A saw a dead link on the wiki for a .dat extractor. Does anyone still have this, and/or its source code, and/or remember exactly what it was extracting? I'm not really getting any leads here.

While textures are easy to pull out, I haven't seen any ideas on how to extract models from the dat file. Your bast bet is to simply check the screenshot forum.

I might still have a copy of it, I'll have to look.

Also, take heed, someone slipped a trojan into one distribution of the executable for this program, so you are strongly advised to compile your own.

No, there's no model viewer. The format is too complicated for everyone who's looked into it.

Dunno about you guys but I'd gladly pay 10 euros for [account-wide, unlimited] access to a NPC like the Anatomical Engineer, that worked like a dressup game and let you preview your char in armor piece combinations for all armors for its profession. Add dye mix preview to that and it would be perfect.

Getting your armor just the way you want it is such a time and money consuming task.


FWIW, when I was in the same situation here's what I did. Went to the wiki, luckily for that particular profession (warrior) some kind soul had uploaded frontal "clean" shots (white background) of all the armors I was interested in. I had to resize one of them but in the end I managed to obtain front shots that overlapped more or less perfectly. Loaded them in Gimp as layers and started shuffling the layers around and rubbing out parts of the upper layers. Basically I was able to overlap pieces of different armors in this manner.

Also FWIW, I ended up not doing any mix, went with all-Tyrian armor for one char and all-Istani for another.

In another case, for my Dervish, I did end up doing a mix of Elona/Istani/Sunspear armor but I used low AL pieces, which are like 100 a whole set. And let's not even get started on mixing dyes to get the right color. Granted, this doesn't apply to elite armor.

That's a nice idea, never tought of that. Only probs are exotic,kurzick,luxon, Elite. Otherwise, wiki is the poor man's previewer. There's also PvP for some sets, not sure exactly how far you can test.

And concerning your idea, I personnally wouldn't buy it, but the idea is just good to have SOMEWHERE in the game. (free?).